Wife and Kitsch

Tucked on a side street in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood is Foyer, a small store specializing in plants, stationery, and “treasures.” On a bleak January day I stopped in for a couple of tillandsia and succulents to liven up the afternoon and stumbled on a slim collection of poetry. Apparently displayed because its malachite-colored cover harmonized with the nearby aloes and fiddle-leaf figs, the book’s spine declared it This Is My Beloved by W. Benton.

Flipping through, I was struck by how alternately arresting yet silly the verses were. Opening at random to “Entry August 27,” I read: “The white full moon like a great beautiful whore / solicits over the city, eggs the lovers on—.” Then a little later, “Entry September 17”: “See, I alter nothing. This is you and I in dark-gray lead, / on plain white paper. No flattering / magenta colors. No accompaniment in minor key—or brilliant arpeggios.” Later still, “Entry September 27”: “How dark is the river! How still … and dark / with deep, slow moving darkness! / the seagulls, dreaming violence, cried me awake with their strangely anguished / voices—like the voices of women being taken in love.” Was this good poetry? Did it matter? Benton’s lush imagery, coupled with his over-the-top excess, made it impossible to look away. Here was a writer going for broke on every page in a way that felt goofy but winsome. I scooped up the book for five bucks.

Researching back home, I discovered that Benton was born in 1904 in a region of what is now Ukraine known as Polish Galicia, and relocated to the United States with his mother and siblings in 1921. He was kind of a proto-Rod McKuen. In fact, McKuen—a singer-songwriter and one of the bestselling poets of the 1960s—credited Benton as an inspiration, and acknowledged that his “more romantic poetry” was influenced by Benton’s two books. “Until I came to Random House,” McKuen said, “Benton held the record for selling the most books of poetry at that venerable publishing establishment.”

Like McKuen, Benton released several albums of poetry, beginning with Atlantic Records’ 1949 rendition of This Is My Beloved, narrated by actor John Dall and backed by a 28-piece orchestra and a 16-voice chorus. In 1956, actor Alfred Ryder and composer Vernon Duke issued another recorded take on the book. A few years later, in 1962, louche movie star Laurence Harvey released his own lounge lizard interpretation, accompanied by jazz musician Herbie Mann. Finally, in 1968, Arthur Prysock—whose baritone “projected a calm, reassuring virility,” according to the New York Times—put out a version in which he read excerpts from This Is My Beloved over an instrumental jazz backdrop.

Benton was massively popular in his heyday. This Is My Beloved came out in 1943; Billboard reported in early 1949 that the book had sold more than 350,000 copies, and it remained continuously in print for decades. Benton’s work appeared in the Yale Review, Esquire, the New Republic, Poetry, and other prestigious outlets, but he’s best remembered today (if at all) for his World War II poetry. The only contemporary review of This Is My Beloved I could track down was in Kirkus Reviews in 1942. It’s a wry, saucy write-up that reads: “High voltage verse, this, in free verse for a sequence of lyrics commemorating a love affair and its termination. Intimate corporeal and physical detail and extravagant praise thereof, in what might mildly be termed erotica. D.H. Lawrence—move over.” 

Whatever critics’ ambivalence, Benton wrote one of the bestselling poetry collections in America. Why had I never heard of him? Exposure doesn’t equal merit, of course, but these poems had resonated with hundreds of thousands of readers over the years and now struck a chord in me. I wanted to understand why.

***

I started with an exhaustive search through the library at DePaul University, where I teach—a search that included several historical indices and every poetry reference book the research librarian could find. I came up with zero leads about Benton. From the few biographical sources online, I learned that he worked mostly manual jobs—on a farm, at a steel mill, as a window washer—to put himself through college at Ohio University during the Great Depression. After college he moved to New York City and worked as a social investigator. During World War II, he was a lieutenant and then a captain in the Signal Corps. When he returned to New York, he “devoted his time to writing,” according to his publisher. But he published only one other collection, Never a Greater Need (1948), which includes some of his war poetry, before suffering a massive stroke in 1965. He died in 1976. That’s all I could find out about one of America’s most successful poets.

But Benton’s work told a deeper story. Whether classified as a series of poems or a single long poem divided into sections, This Is My Beloved chronicles a steamy love affair and its unwelcome conclusion. The volume is dedicated to “Lillian,” and each line addresses her. All of the poems are titled “Entry” and each is followed by a date, giving the pieces a diaristic quality with all the intimacy and revelation one would expect. Devouring the book at my dining room table that icy January morning put me in mind of a tradition going back to Ovid and his imaginary Corinna, or the Bible’s Song of Solomon, with its unexpectedly candid treatment of desire. After I finished reading, I discovered a blurb by famed author and anthologist Louis Untermeyer that expressed similar sentiments: “I certainly do not find these poems pornographic. They are direct and free, quick with life and warm with remembered passion. The imagery is sensuous and exact, but no more graphic—or pornographic—than the images in the Song of Songs. It is remarkable how Benton has varied the erotic theme and the overtones of physical love.” (Untermeyer later included Benton in his Uninhibited Treasury of Erotic Poetry, published by Dial Press in 1963.)  

Untermeyer certifies Benton’s eroticism as aesthetically legitimate if nonetheless forbidden. In his essay “A Yeti in the District,” the poet Donald Hall observes that in every generation “there is one poet whom high school boys read to high school girls in order to get into their pants. In my day, it was Walter Benton, whose This Is My Beloved was endorsed by the anthologist Louis Untermeyer in publishers’ ads (‘I certainly do not find these poems pornographic’), which swept a teenage mob into bookstores.” 

The implicit disreputability of Untermeyer’s endorsement is spot-on because Benton’s poems are risqué but decidedly not porn. It’s unlikely that anybody masturbates to Benton’s verse. Rather, it seems designed to be, as Hall puts it, an accoutrement to enjoy with someone else—a Valentine, a tool for seduction. It’s mood music and low lights. It’s incense, wine, and candles. But it’s not just that. This Is My Beloved also reminds me of the 17th century Cavalier poetry of Robert Herrick, with Benton’s “Lillian” being the equivalent of Herrick’s “Julia.” It also recalls the frank carnality of Walt Whitman: big-voiced, full-throated, and unashamed. There are shades of the authoritative-in-love voice of Edna St. Vincent Millay in Benton’s explicit catalogue of physical pleasures, but without any cynicism or self-restraint. There’s even something Shakespearean in the sense that, as in the Bard’s sonnets, Benton’s poems are about both his beloved and his rhetorical skill in expressing that love.

In “Entry May 11,” for instance, he writes that “Some see you in similes,” whereas he sees “you best unrelated … with not a metaphor to your name: / your hair not like the silk of corn or spiders but like your hair, / your mouth resembling nothing so wonderfully much as your own mouth.” In other words, he understands Lillian’s beauty as best left unadorned, because “compliments become you / as tinsel becomes a tall snow covered cedar in a mountain cedar wood.”

At times, Benton’s passion is sophisticated and at other times bafflingly naïve, as in “Entry November 15”:

I learned your hair many ways … by the musk and visually,
by the Braille touch. I could tell which part of your body grew
   it:
the underhair fringing your face was sensitive like thin smoke
   in a draught,
between your thighs it was natural and crisp like the hearts of
   lettuce.

Conflating pubic hair with salad raises the prospect that it might be impossible to write erotically without also writing comically, whether that comedy is intentional or not.

Benton’s forthright sensuality appealed to the readers of his age, and the book was eagerly bought and consumed, albeit not much written about. The mid-20th century was a more buttoned-up era, and a reputable newspaper likely would not have reviewed Benton. Thus, his stratospheric sales figures seem attributable to grassroots fandom and enthusiastic word of mouth. I figured this explained why I came up dry in finding further details about Benton himself.

All other resources leading to dead ends, I signed up for a 14-day free trial on a genealogy site just to reach one of Benton’s distant relatives who posted on that service’s message boards. While waiting for his reply, I read and re-read This Is My Beloved, trying to put my finger on what mesmerized me about the poems, why Benton held me rapt.

The poet William Rose Benét offers some insight. Benét, who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Dust Which Is God (1941), also edited the Saturday Review of Literature, which published several Benton poems. Of This Is My Beloved, Benét declared:

Never before has the delight and wonder experienced in young love, in which is implicit physical discovery, been conveyed with such touching honesty or with rhapsody so involving unconscious pathos. Those who seek to drag any honest writing through the gutters of their own minds will do the same with this. Those who are not afraid of the strange miracle of life will understand this brave verse.

A commendation, yes, but one with a caveat built-in, for the pathos in Benton frequently is, for better or worse, un-self-aware, and the strange miracle of life as he presents it is also accidentally funny.

Benton’s poems come across as ostentatious, extravagant, and perhaps a little insane, a spectacle in questionable taste, like proposing on the JumboTron at a sports game or raining a billion rose petals on your beloved from a helicopter. His aptitude for devotion is almost self-parodic and certainly breathless, much like a Douglas Sirk melodrama. His speaker will do anything for his lady and he doesn’t care who knows it. Take “Entry November 12,” in which he describes waiting for Lillian so long that “nothing else in this God’s hell meant anything.” He tells his absent lover:

I had everything you love—shellfish and
     saltsticks … watercress,
black olives. Wine (for the watch I pawned), real cream
for our coffee. Smoked cheese, currants in port, preserved
     wild cherries.
 
I bought purple asters from a pushcart florist and placed
     them where
they would be between us—
imagining your lovely face among them …

When Lillian forsakes him and his snacks, he is crestfallen and roves nighttime streets where “the glittering pile, Manhattan, swarmed like an uncovered dung heap” and the steeple of St. Mark’s rises “mouldy with moonlight.” Elsewhere, he lays his emotions bare, as in the first entry, “April 28”: “I need your love, / I need love more than hope or money, wisdom or a drink // Because slow negative death withers the world—and only yes / can turn the tide.”

On page after page, he’s like a prototype of Lloyd Dobler, the clueless romantic John Cusack plays in Say Anything. Much like the hero of a rom-com, he doesn’t want only to bone; he wants a relationship. He is boyfriend material. Each winter, he promises, “there will be long evenings together to forget, reading or talking—having friends.” He wants not just to “move nearer, / nearer heaven—until I burst inside you like a screaming rocket,” but also all the little quotidian thrills of “cool mint toothpaste kisses.”

I suspect Benton’s poetry was popular because he recognized the inherent sex appeal of being almost absurdly present. He neither dwells on the past nor frets about the future. He doesn’t think about the news or look at his phone. He’s there with his beloved, Lillian, in the fullness of the moment, minus distractions. Each poem flaunts the allure of being here now, of embodying the cliché of lovers feeling like the only two people in the world. But Benton takes this a step further: his lovers are the only two people in the space-time continuum. (An article in the Atlantic last year asked: “Why are young people having so little sex?” The author partly blamed a culture awash in distractions. There are no distractions whatsoever in Benton.)

As he writes in “Entry June 12”: “Sleep late, nobody cares what time it is. / Sunday morning, coffee in bed … then love / with coffee flavored kisses,” adding “I have been hours awake looking at you lithely at rest in the free / natural way rivers bed and clouds shape.” He approaches his subject in an unhurried way, and there’s something dated yet beguiling about his grand romantic tableaux put across with utmost sincerity.

His lack of inhibition also captures the intoxicated throes of romantic love with a vividness that feels intoxicating unto itself. A contact high of sorts, as in “Entry October 31”:

                            The wind is soft, the rain is
      beautiful—
what did you do to the wind, and the rain, and the clouds?
 
And to me?
See, I am drunk, high … I am drunk on you as on a reefer!

He’s so euphoric over Lillian that he can scarcely articulate how drugs work.

In 2005, the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher conducted a groundbreaking study in which she scanned the brains of 2,500 college students who were shown photographs of their beloveds and of their acquaintances. The former images caused the “brains to become active in regions rich with dopamine, the so-called feel-good neurotransmitter,” per a write-up of the study in the Harvard Medical School blog. In a subsequent TED Talk, Fisher noted, “It’s part of what we call the reptilian core of the brain […] In fact, the same brain region where we found activity becomes active also when you feel the rush of cocaine.”    

Benton well apprehends the high highs and low lows of such inebriated states. His “Entry November 19” speaks directly to this sensation: “What enslaving cocktail have I sucked from your full mouth … to leave me so totally yours!” Individuals under the influence don’t always display keenly calibrated senses of proportion, and that leads to Benton’s impulse to gild the lily, then gild it again, as in “Entry October 15,” in which he sees everything with an almost trippy luminosity:

The evening star rises like a flaming wick.
Hills fit into hills like lovers, their great dark straddling
     thighs
clasping still greater darkness where they meet. A star breaks,
arcs down the night—like God striking a match across the
     cathedral ceiling.

One of the great beauties of Benton’s poetry, at least to me, is that it feels incapable of embarrassment. His speaker isn’t cool in any sense of the word—he’s not distant, not detached; he holds nothing in reserve. If anything, he’s somewhat warm and moist: a sweaty hand clasping the hand of his paramour. The poetry’s enticement (if you find it enticing) and its silliness (if you find it silly) has much to do with the kind of masculinity that Benton is unafraid to portray. That these monologues so clearly come from a besotted man to his beloved woman is perhaps a bit retrograde, but also daftly sweet. He’s sexual but not lascivious, carnal but not crude, lustful but not lecherous. He loses proportion in ways that are charming, not upsetting. Consent is never not a concern; when Lillian’s not in the mood, he gets sad, but he never denies her the right to deny him; he tries to seduce, yes, but never to force. In short, it is absorbingly fun to spend time with someone—now long gone—who still feels so madly alive on the page.

***

About 10 days after I reached out to him online, Benton’s great-great-grand-nephew, Pete Liberopoulos, responded with a trove of documents containing glimpses into Benton’s life, including a marriage certificate from 1931 to a Lillian Kromm in Greenup, Kentucky, a small border town on the Ohio River. My heart rejoiced: Lillian was real!

Benton passed away a few years before Pete was born, so he never knew the poet personally, but he recounted conversations he’d had about him with his grandmother. “She didn’t give me much on Walter except a couple of times to mention that he was a ‘dirty’ writer,” Liberopoulos said. “I don’t think she meant it in a derogatory way towards Walter, but I don’t know. […] perhaps she just didn’t approve of or even read his work.”

Liberopoulos directed me to Benton’s niece, Millie Cornicelli, now in her mid-80s and living in Warren, Ohio. She’s probably the last person alive with firsthand knowledge of Benton. I looked her up in the Whitepages, called her landline, and could hardly believe my luck when she answered. Her understandably suspicious “What do you want?” when her “Hello?” was met with the voice of a stranger melted into delight when I revealed the purpose of my call. We talked for almost an hour, and her admiration for her long-dead uncle was obvious: “He was a great man, a great intellect, and he never learned the English language until he was 18. But his poetry! […] You know how poetry captures something you can’t put into words? To me, his poetry is like a Chagall painting, where he’s in love and floating in air and his heart is over here and his head is over there.”

Lillian, she explained, was of Jewish descent, “and she was already betrothed in the Jewish community.” But Lillian’s well-to-do parents sent her away to college. “Her parents didn’t approve of Walter because he wasn’t Jewish, so they eloped. After that, they both finished at Ohio University and went to New York and became social workers, both of them.”

When I asked if the relationship really was as tumultuous as it appeared on the page, she said, “He was so in love and they eventually divorced. And you know what? He went downhill. They had their ups and downs. […]. He became an alcoholic after his final breakup with Lillian.” His alcoholism eventually led to his stroke.

Curious about what Benton looked like, I asked Cornicelli to describe him. She laughed and said that you might picture him as young, tall, dark, and dashing, but he was very fair, very blonde, and he was medium-sized. He had high cheekbones and had begun to go bald very young, but he was muscular, so muscular, and used to do Charles Atlas exercises.

Of his pen name, Cornicelli explained that Knopf, Benton’s publisher, told him that if he had still lived in Austria and was published as an international poet, he could keep his Ukrainian name. (Potashnik means “little bird” in Ukrainian.) But since he was in America and being published as an American, the only way he would sell was if he took an Americanized name. “So he took the name of a county in Ohio where he and Lillian used to go and watch the sheep in the pasture, and canoodle or whatever, when they were together at OU.”

During Cornicelli’s senior year at college, Benton invited her to New York for a visit as an early graduation present. “He loaned me his paratrooper boots and we went hiking in the White Mountains,” she said. Back in the city, they went to Chinatown, the Museum of Natural History, and other places that were a thrill to her, having just arrived on a Greyhound Bus from Oxford, Ohio.

“He lived in this little residential hotel in the mid-50s, and he told me he lived in a penthouse,” she said, adding that she pictured a lavish apartment. Instead, she took an elevator with a grille door to the top floor and climbed a circular staircase to a crowded room. “He was a packrat and he had all this stuff he’d collected over time,” she said.

The view, which she expected to be glamorous, was more like On the Waterfront, rough “with pigeons and such.” Benton arranged for her to stay in a room below that belonged to an Argentinian wrestler named Rocky who was away on tour. Cornicelli loved every minute of her trip. When it was over, Benton put her on one of her first plane rides, a TWA flight “with all the stewardesses and the linen and the china.”

Walter and Lillian’s romance was so renowned, Cornicelli told me, that famed radio commentator Walter Winchell supposedly mentioned the couple’s break-up on the air. She couldn’t remember when that was, and the poems’ diary entry titles don’t bear a year. All we know is that in the book’s final entry, “November 25,” which takes place sometime before the book’s publication in 1942, Lillian is gone and Benton’s speaker is “lost on an island somewhere between two rivers” where “The city gargles dust in the streets” and there’s no more love, only “the harbor’s lifted morass and the belchings of many chimneys.”

Benton’s vitality, even when lovelorn, makes it easy to see why he was so popular in his lifetime and what a reader might get from indulging in him now. For he is that: an indulgence, not categorically good but absorbing to read—personal and amusing, accessible and romantic. It makes sense that Untermeyer was a fan, given his commitment to chipping away the stereotype of poetry as a highbrow art and replacing that myth with the reality he saw: “What most of us don’t realize is that everyone loves poetry.”

This Is My Beloved is not merely love poems, but the whole arc of a relationship, including its end, apparently written in real time. This immediacy and scope still speak to readers, regardless of what stage of a relationship they’re in. Benton’s poems are almost universally relatable to anyone who has ever longed and loved and lost. His love—fulsome, immoderate—fills me with love for This Is My Beloved. I give his small but incandescent oeuvre five shining stars and a planet to boot. Such a profligate gesture is no less than what Benton would offer.